Talk:List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 2018

Chart dates for January 2018

Billboard is adjusting its chart dates to closer align online release of the charts and official issue date of the magazine. --Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars^{Talk to me} 18:49, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Billboard charts set to post online Wednesday, Dec. 27 (following a holiday week release schedule) will be dated Wednesday, Jan. 3, one of the rare times that a Billboard chart date will not correspond to a Saturday. There is no printed issue of Billboard that week. The first Billboard issue of 2018 will be dated Saturday, Jan. 6; since Monday, Jan. 1, is a holiday, its corresponding charts will post online a day later than usual, on that Wednesday, Jan. 3.[1]

MOS:ACCESS

I am thinking about moving the Issue date column from the leftmost position to after the albums and artists columns if the rowspans are maintained on those two columns. Screen readers parse the data in the table in such a way that can leave visually impaired or blind users confused when rowspans are involved. Take a portion of the table from this article for instance:

Issue date	Album	Artist(s)	Ref.
January 3	Revival	Eminem
January 6	Reputation	Taylor Swift
January 13	The Greatest Showman	Soundtrack
January 20
January 27	Camila	Camila Cabello
February 3	Mania	Fall Out Boy

A screen reader will read this as "Issue date", "Album", "Artist(s)", "Ref.", "January 3", "Revival", "Eminem", "1" (for the ref number in that column), "January 6", "Reputation", "Taylor Swift", "2", "January 13", "The Greatest Showman", "Soundtrack", "3", "January 20", "4" (skips to the ref column due to the rowspans on The Greatest Showman album), "January 27", "Camila", "Camila Cabello", "5", "February 3", "Mania", "Fall Out Boy", "6". A visually impaired person may interpret that as having no #1 album on January 20, 2018, or perhaps that Camila was #1 that week (along with the week it actually was, on January 27), or something else. Not completely sure how a screen reader can be configured, but I'm doubting that their parsing can be adjusted to account for rowspans. While there are perhaps other things that can be addressed to make the table accessibility-compliant, use of rowspan is one of those that easily can violate this compliance.

References

Adjusting the table to put the Issue date after the album and artists columns would look like this (removed references for simplicity in describing the screen reader's parsing below):

Album	Artist(s)	Issue date	Ref.
Revival	Eminem	January 3
Reputation	Taylor Swift	January 6
The Greatest Showman	Soundtrack	January 13
		January 20
Camila	Camila Cabello	January 27
Mania	Fall Out Boy	February 3

The screen reader would read this as "Album", "Artist(s)", "Issue date", "Ref.", "Revival", "Eminem", "January 3", "Reputation", "Taylor Swift", "January 6", "The Greatest Showman", "Soundtrack", "January 13", "January 20" (this part important as it would effectively list the dates of all consecutive issues that The Greatest Showman was #1 without intervening with some other data), "Camila", "Camila Cabello", "January 27", "Mania", "Fall Out Boy", "February 3". Someone using the screen reader may more likely tie January 13 and January 20 to the weeks The Greatest Showman soundtrack was #1, which is correct.

More discussion regarding accessibility compliance as it applies to tables can be found at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Data tables tutorial. While I'm not against the current table appearance - the issue date on the left is more aesthetically pleasing - the visually impaired who use these screen readers to read what's in the article may think otherwise if they become confused over how the data is presented to them. MPFitz1968 (talk) 20:07, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Are there any alternate solutions? It really reads much worse without a numbering system of sorts on the left side. Sergecross73 msg me 20:24, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

@Sergecross73: To comply with MOS:ACCESS, the best solution would be not to use rowspans at all if we keep it a table in its current capacity. Or we could summarize the total number of weeks each album was at #1, with the issue date of its first week indicated on the left, which could be in a table or a simple list. MPFitz1968 (talk) 20:30, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

You might want to bring this up at a bigger venue - I think this would affect a large number of these Billboard charts, and they don't seem to attract much in the way of core editors, they seem to largely be edited by passerbys. Besides you and me, I don't see a ton of input happening right here, right now... Sergecross73 msg me 20:35, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Not that there aren't other readability issues, but I've always preferred the decade lists over the table format used in the yearly lists (List of Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles of the 2010s vs. List of Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles of 2018, for example). Why 10 rows for "God's Plan" when 1 will do? --Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars^{Talk to me} 18:23, 5 April 2018 (UTC)